I. As one of the interpretations of the second principle of justice as fairness, Rawls argues that “democratic equality” is the best avenue for citizens to realize their life projects, as meeting of the difference principle with fair equality of opportunity. The second principle states that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (Rawls, 53). With an unequal distribution of situations, the purpose of society “is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate” (Rawls, 65). The principles of justice are in place to ensure that the “assignment of rights and duties” through the basic structure of society justly distribute both the “benefits and burdens” of social and economic advantages (Rawls, 47).
The first view is procedural justice, the process by which individuals gain their wealth. Procedural justice is a non-consequentialist argument focusing on the grounds that if individuals of a society attained their wealth fairly, then there is nothing unjust about an uneven distribution of wealth in a ...
Persuasive Essay:
The Implications of Retributive and Restorative Justice
When the general public is asked about defining a concept of justice, most tend to settle on the idea of fairness. However, what fairness means to one may be inconceivable to another; it is subjective. Within scholarly circles, there are two dichotomies of justice that are discussed: retributive justice and restorative justice. Retributive justice centers on a sense of just desserts, of punishment against the offender to fix the wrong that they have committed. On the other hand, restorative justice emphasizes mediation and understanding between the victim and the offender.
There are four main theories of justice retributive, utilitarian, restorative, and parallel justice. All four theories have different ways of interpreting both procedural and distributive justice. Procedure justice according to Newmark, L. (2017) is the “the process used to determine society’s response to a crime; the steps taken to arrive at an outcome; how society decides what it should do about a crime”. Distributive justice on the other hand has to do with the consequences that one receives from the justice system. The definition of distributive justice is society’s response to the crime; the consequences that society provides for the crime; what society does about a crime; the outcomes resulting from the process” (Newmark, L. 2017). Each theory has a different opinion of how procedural and distributive justice work in the system, but they both apply procedural and distributive justice within the theories. Another similarity can be found between retributive and utilitarian justice, both of these theories of justice are only offender-focused theories. Restorative and parallel justices also have a commonality in the fact that they include victim focused and offender focused justice.
Justice is seen as a concept that is balanced between law and morality. The laws that support social harmony are considered just. Rawls states that justice is the first virtue of social institutions; this means that a good society is one structured according to principles of justice. The significance of principles of justice is to provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of the society and defining the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of the society. According to Rawls, justice is best understood by a grasp of the principles of justice (Rawls, 1971). The principles are expected to represent the moral basis of political government. These principles indicate that humankind needs liberty and freedom so long as they do harm others. Rawls states that justice is significant to human development and prosperity.
Justice, a concept that has been argued since the beginning of history, but what is justice. This idea has changed throughout time, whether that be an eye for an eye, leave no debt unpaid, or modern times, in which sentences are handed out in response to how horrific the crime was. Justice has forever been changing, and has taken many definitions, but John Rawls came to know it as this idea of fairness. This idea of fairness is center around an idea of cooperation and through this cooperation, which he further explains as, “Indeed a central element of the terms of cooperation is what Rawls terms “reciprocity”, involving evaluations of benefits and respect to publicly affirmed benchmark of “equality” (Bradford 614). Thus, the debate of whether
The relationship between justice and the good is and has been debated for thousands of years between many intelligent philosophers. Many theorists have attempted to to explain the exact characteristics and outline a moral distribution of possessions. From just after the First World War to present day, liberal perspectives emerged and flourished across a variety of ideological theories and continue to influence political thinking in regards to rights, equality and freedom. With this emergence came two very influential theorists in libertarian political philosophy, Robert Nozick and John Rawls, who take very different approaches to how justice relates to the good. Both Nozick and Rawls argue for liberty above equality, and that there is some degree of equality necessary within a society, however approach it from very different angles.
To Young, economic justice is not just about who has money because “economic domination derives at least as much from the corporate and legal structures and procedures that give some persons the power to make decisions about investment, production, marketing, employment, interest rates, and wages that affect millions of other people” (Young 23). In the distributive paradigm, as Young conceives of it, there is no mechanism for examining the justice of an arrangement that concentrates decision making power in the hands of a select few unless that power is used to create distributive injustices of some other
By definition justice means the quality of being just or fair. The issue then stands, is justice fair for everyone? Justice is the administration of law, the act of determining rights and assigning rewards or punishments, "justice deferred is justice denied.” The terms of Justice is brought up in Henry David Thoreau’s writing, “Civil Disobedience.”
Throughout the years in the US, there has been a lot of controversy on how the government should be running; therefore, theories have been established by certain scholars to answer the commotion of distributive justice. Distributive justice plays a big role in each theory because it is something that affects everyone in this nation. Distributive justice is the concept that determines where the allocation of goods in a society goes. Well-known scholars such as Locke, Mill, Nozick, Rawls, and Marx have created ideas that impact the way certain societies run in the US.